Attract Visitors to Your Site The Mini Missing Manual
Attract
Visitors to
Your SiteAttract Visitors to Your Site: The Mini Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald Copyright © 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly Media books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales
promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles: safari. oreilly.com. For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com .January 2010: First Edition.
The Missing Manual is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The
Missing Manual logo, and “The book that should have been in the box” are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media is aware of a trademark claim, the designations are capitalized. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained in it.ISBN: 9781449382520
Table of Contents
Introduction .......................................................................................v Attract Visitors To Your Site ............................................................. 1
Your Web Site Promotion Plan .....................................................................................................1 Spreading the Word .......................................................................................................................3 Reciprocal Links ......................................................................................................................4 Web Rings ................................................................................................................................6 Shameless Self-Promotion ....................................................................................................8 Return Visitors .......................................................................................................................10
Adding Meta Elements.................................................................................................................13 The Description Meta Element ...........................................................................................16 The Keyword Meta Element ...............................................................................................16 Directories and Search Engines ..................................................................................................19 Directories .............................................................................................................................19 Search Engines......................................................................................................................25
Tracking Visitors ............................................................................................................................35 Understanding Google Analytics ........................................................................................38 Signing Up for Google Analytics ........................................................................................40 Examining your Web Traffic ................................................................................................43
Colophon ......................................................................................... 53
Introduction
A critical part of website success is attracting visitors. This Mini Missing Manual gives you the knowledge and tools you need to do that. It shows you how to build a community around your site and how to use the power of keywords and Web search engines to rise up in the rankings of search results.
Once you do that, you’ll want to see how effective your efforts are. You’ll learn how to use a powerful—and free—service that tracks visitor activity on your site; Google Analytics lets you know where your visitors live, what browser they use, which of your Web pages they love, and—just as important—which pages don’t work for them. Using this information, you can fine-tune your site to keep the visitors coming.
Tip: To learn more about building and improving your website,
see Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual.Attract Visitors To Your Site
he best website in the world won’t do you much good if it’s sitting out there all by its lonesome self. For your site to flour- ish, you need to find the best way to attract visitors—and
T
keep them flocking back for more. In this Mini Missing Manual, you’ll learn some valuable tricks for promoting your site. You’ll also see how search engines work, how to make sure they regularly in- dex your site, and how to work your way up the rankings of search results. Lastly, you’ll learn to gauge the success of your site with visitor tracking, and you’ll use a powerful free service called Google Analytics to learn some of your visitors’ deepest secrets (like where they live, what browser they use, and which of your web pages they find absolutely unbearable). Before you know it, you’ll be more popular than chocolate ice cream.
Your Website Promotion Plan
Before you plunge into the world of website promotion, you need a plan. So grab a pencil and plenty of paper, and get ready to jot down your ideas for global website domination (fiendish cackling optional).
Although all webmasters have their own tactics, it’s generally agreed that the best way to market a website is to follow these steps:
1. Build a truly great website.
If you start promoting your site before there’s anything to see, you’re wasting your effort (and probably burning a few bridges). Nothing says “never come back” like an empty web- site with an “under construction” message.
2. See step 1.
If in doubt, keep polishing and perfecting your site. Fancy graphics aren’t the key concern here—the most important detail is whether you have some genuinely useful content. Ask yourself—if you were browsing the Web, would you stop to take a look at this site? Make sure you’ve taken the time to add the kinds of content that keep visitors coming back.
3. Share links with friends and like-minded sites.
This step is all about building community. Contrary to what you might expect, this sort of small-scale, word-of-mouth promotion might bring more traffic to your site than high- powered search engines like Google.
4. Perfect your site’s meta elements.
Meta elements contain hidden words that convey important information about your site’s content, like a site description. Search engines use them as one way to determine what your website’s all about. For details, see below.
5. Submit your website to Internet directories.
Like search engines, directories help visitors find websites. The difference between directories and search engines is that directories are generally smaller catalogs put together by humans, rather than huge sprawling text indexes amassed by computers. Now you’re ready for the big time. Once you submit your web- site to web heavyweights like Google and Yahoo, it officially enters the public eye. However, it takes time to climb up the rankings and get spotted.
7. Figure out what happened.
To assess the successes and failures of your strategy, you need to measure some vital statistics—how many people visit your site, how long they’re staying, and how many visitors come back for more. To take stock, you need to crack open tools like hit counters and server logs. Throughout this book, you’ll tackle these steps, get some new ideas, and build up a collection of promotion strategies.
Spreading the Word
Some of the most effective promotion you can do doesn’t involve any high-tech XHTML wonkery, but instead amounts to variations on the theme of good old-fashioned advertising. The first step is to find other websites like yours. If you create a topic-oriented site—your musings on, say, golf, fine jewelry, or jeweled golf clubs—similar sites make up your virtual neighbor- hood. They’re part of a larger online community to which you now belong. So why not introduce yourself? Strike up a reciprocal link relationship (see the next section).
On the other hand, if you’re creating a business site, similar sites are, obviously, your competitors. As a result, you’re unlikely to share links. However, it’s a great idea to Google your competition. You’ll probably find service sites—business directories, news sites, content sites, and so on—that link to these competitors. Once you find these service sites, you can publicize your site there as well.
Reciprocal Links
A reciprocal link is a link-trading agreement. The concept is simple. You find a website with similar content and strike a bargain: Link to my site, and I’ll link to yours. Reciprocal links are an important thread in the underlying fabric of the Web. If you’re not sure where to start searching for potential link buddies, pay a visit to Google and use the link: operator (as explained in Figure 1-1 ) to see who’s linking to sites similar to yours. (You can get an even more power- ful link viewer as part of the Google Webmaster Tools, described in
“Google AdWords” , below.)
Reciprocal links only work if there’s a logical connection between the two sites. For example, if you create the website http://www. ChocolateSculptures.com/, it probably makes sense to exchange links with http://www.101ChocolateRecipes.com/. But http://www. HomerSimpsonForPresident.com/ is a far stretch, no matter how much traffic it gets.
Topic isn’t the only consideration in link exchanges. You should also look for sites that feel professional. If a similarly themed site is choked with ads, barren of content, formatted with fuchsia text on a black background, and was last updated circa 1998, keep looking. Once you find a site you want to exchange links with, dig around on the site for the webmaster’s email address. Send a message ex- plaining that you love http://www.101ChocolateRecipes.com/, and plan to link to it from your site, http://www.ChocolateSculptures. com/. Then, gently suggest that you think your website would be of great interest to http://www.101ChocolateRecipes.com/ readers.
Tip: reciprocal linking can require a little finesse. it’s best to look for sites that complement yours, but don’t necessarily compete with it. You’ll also have more luck if you approach web peers, sites of similar quality or with a similar amount of traffic to yours.
Figure 1-1: Google has a little-known but valuable search keyword that identifies sites that link to your site (or anyone else’s for that matter). It’s the link: operator. If you type in link:http://www.disneylandparis.com/ , for example, you see all the sites that link to EuroDisney’s home page. You can use any URL you want (for example, try link:http://www.disneylandparis. com/uk/introduction.htm/ to find out who’s linking to the English-language intro page).
Once you enter into a link agreement—even if it’s just an informal exchange of emails—remember to keep your end of the deal. Don’t remove the link from your site without letting the other webmaster know about the change. It’s also a good idea to keep checking on the other site to make sure your link remains promi- nent. If it disappears, don’t fly into an Othellian rage—just send a polite email asking where it went or why it disappeared.
Reciprocal links are also a good way to start working your way up search engine rankings (see “Rising up in the rankings” below). That’s because one of the criteria Google takes into account when it determines how to order the results of a web search is how many other sites link to yours. The more popular you are, the more likely you’ll climb up the list.
There are some companies that sell reciprocal link services.
Note:
The basic idea is that they try to pair up different websites (for
a fee) in a link-sharing agreement. Don’t fall for it. Your traffic
might increase, but the visitors you get won’t really be interested in the content of your site, and they won’t hang around for long.Web Rings
A web ring is similar to a reciprocal link, but instead of sharing a link between two partners, it binds a group of websites together. For example, imagine you create a brilliant new site featuring real- ity TV trivia. To get more exposure, you can join a web ring dedi- cated to reality TV. You agree to put a block of XHTML on your site that advertises the ring and lets your visitors go to other sites in it. As payback, you become another stop within the ring (see Figure 1-2 ).
Figure 1-2: Many Web ring sites don’t list the formal address of all the member sites. Instead, visitors move from one site to the next using previ- ous and next links. This sequence of sites makes up the “ring.”
Sadly, the majority of web rings consist of gaudy, amateurish Web disasters. Pair up with these nightmares and your site will be deemed guilty by association. However, with a little research, you may find a higher-quality ring. Maybe. To search for one, use Google (enter the topic followed by the words “web ring”).
Note: The biggest disadvantage to Web rings is that they usually require you to add a fairly ugly set of links to your page. Before you sign up, carefully evaluate whether the extra traffic is worth
it, and travel to all the other sites in the ring to see if they’re of
similar quality. if you’re in a ring with low-quality sites, it can
hurt your reputation.Shameless Self-Promotion
To get your website listed on many of the Web’s most popular sites, you need to fork over some cold, hard cash. However, some of the best advertising doesn’t cost anything. The trick is to look for sites where you can promote and contribute at the same time.
For example, if you create the website http://www.HotComput- erTricks.com/, why not answer a few questions on a computing newsgroup or discussion board? It’s considered tactless to openly promote your site, but there’s nothing wrong with dispensing some handy advice and following it up with a signature that in- cludes your URL.
Here’s an example of how you can answer a poster’s question and put in a good word for yourself at the same time:
Jim, The problem is that most hard drives will fail when submerged in water. Hence, your fishing computer idea won’t work. Sasha Mednick http://www.HotComputerTricks.com/
An answer posting is much better than sending an email directly to the original poster because on a popular site hundreds of com- puter aficionados with the same question will read your posting. If even a few decide to check out your site, you’ve made great progress. If you’re very careful, you might even get away with something that’s a little more explicit:
Jim, The problem is that most hard drives will fail when submerged in water. Hence, your fishing computer idea won’t work. However, you might want to check out my homemade hard-drive vacuum enclosure (http://www.HotComputerTricks.com/), which I developed to solve the same problem. Sasha Mednick http://www.HotComputerTricks.com/
Warning:
This maneuver requires a very light touch. The rule of
thumb is that your message should be well-intentioned. only direct someone to your site if there really is something specific there that addresses the question.Some sites let you post tips, reviews, or articles. If that’s the case, you can use a variation of the technique above. Remember, dis- pense useful advice, and then follow it up with a byline at the end of your message. For example, if you submit a free article that describes how to create your groundbreaking vacuum enclosure, end it with this:
Sasha Mednick is a computer genius who runs the first-rate computing website (http://www.HotComputerTricks.com/).
Promotion always works best if you believe in your product. So make sure there’s some relevant high-quality content on your site before you boast about it. Don’t ever send someone to your site based on some content you plan to add (someday).
Tip: if you’re a business trying to promote a product, you’ll get
further if you recruit other people to help you spread the word.one excellent idea is to look for influential bloggers. For ex-
ample, if you’re trying to sell a new type of fluffy toddler towel
pajamas, hunt down popular people with blogs about parenting. Then, offer them some free pajamas if they’ll offer their thoughts in a blog review. This sort of word-of-mouth promotion can be dramatically more successful in the wide-reaching communities of the Web than it is in the ordinary offline world.Return Visitors
Attracting fresh faces is a critical part of website promotion, but novice webmasters often forget something equally important— return visitors. For a website to become truly popular, it needs to attract visitors who return again and again. Many a website creator would do better to spend less time trying to attract new visitors and more time trying to keep the current flock.
If you’re a marketer, you know that a customer who comes back to the same store three or four times is a lot more likely to make a purchase than someone who’s there on a first visit. These regulars are also more likely to get excited and recruit their friends to come and take a look. This infectious enthusiasm can lead more and more people to your website’s virtual doorstep. The phenomenon is so common it has a name: the traffic virus.
Note: return visitors are the ultimate measuring stick of website
success. if you can’t interest someone enough to come back again, your website’s just not fulfilling its destiny. So how does your website become a favorite stopping point for Web travelers? The old Internet adage says it all—content is king. Your site needs to be chock full of fascinating must-read informa- tion. Just as important, this information needs to change regularly and noticeably. If you update information once a month, your website barely has a pulse. But if you update it two or more times a week, you’re ready to flourish.
Never underestimate the importance of regular updates. It takes weeks and months of up-to-date information to create a return vis- itor. However, one dry spell—say, three months without changing anything more than the color of your buttons—doesn’t just stop attracting newcomers, it can kill off your current roster of return visitors. That’s because savvy visitors immediately realize when a website’s gone stale. They have much the same sensation you feel when you pull out a once-attractive pastry from the fridge and find it’s as hard as igneous rock. You know what happens next—it’s time to toss the pastry away, clear out the website bookmarks, and move on.
signs of a stale site include old-fashioned formatting, Tip: broken links, and references to old events (like a spice Girls cD release party or a technical analysis of why Florida condos are an ironclad investment).
The other way to encourage return visitors is to build a community. Discussion forums, promotional events, and newsletters are like glue. They encourage visitors to feel like they’re participating in your site and sharing your web space. If you get this right, hordes of visitors will move in and never want to leave.
GEM IN THE ROUGH Favorite Icons
one of your first challenges in promoting your site is getting visitors to add your site to their browser bookmarks. However, that’s not enough to guarantee a return visit. Your website also needs to be fascinating enough to beckon from the bookmark menu, tempting visitors to come back. if you’re a typical Web traveler, you regularly visit only about five percent of the sites you bookmark. one way to make your site stand out from the crowd is to change the icon that appears in visitors’ bookmarks or favorites menu (an icon technically called a favicon). This technique is browser-specific, but it works reliably in most versions of internet Explorer, Firefox, and safari. The illustration in this box shows the favicons for Google and Amazon. To create a favicon, add an icon file to the top-level folder of your website, and make sure you name it favicon.ico. The best approach is to use a dedicated icon editor, because it lets you create both a 16-pixel×16-pixel icon and a larger 32-pixel×32-pixel icon in the same file. Browsers use the smaller icon in their bookmark menus, and Win- dows Pcs display the larger version when visitors drag the favicon to their desktop (Macs don’t support the desktop-icon feature). if you don’t have an icon editor, just create a bitmap (a .bmp file) that’s ex- actly 16 pixels wide and 16 pixels high. To get an icon editor, visit a shareware site like http://www.download.com/ .
Adding Meta Elements
Meta elements give you a way to add descriptive information to your web pages, which is important because some web search en- gines rely on these elements to help visitors find your site. Figure 1-3 explains how it all works.
Figure 1-3: Ever wondered where the information you see in search list- ings comes from? The underlined link in the above example (“Sugar Beat”) is the title of the Web page the search engine found. The search engine pulled the site’s description (shown underneath the title) directly from the page’s hidden description meta element.
Note: Fun fact for etymologists and geeks alike: the term “meta element” means “elements about,” as in “elements that provide information about your Web page.”
You put all meta elements in the <head> section of a web page. Here’s a sample meta element that assigns a description to a web page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html ns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta name="description" content="Noodletastic offers custom noodle dishes made to order." /> <title>Noodletastic</title> </head> <body>...</body> </html>All meta elements look more or less the same. The element name is <meta>, the name attribute indicates the type of meta element it is, and the content attribute supplies the relevant information.
Meta elements don’t show up when your page appears in a browser. They’re intended for programs, like browsers and web search engines (see the box below), that read your web page from top to bottom.
In theory, there’s no limit to the types of information you can put inside a meta element. For example, some web page editing pro- grams insert meta elements that say its software built your pages (don’t worry; once you understand meta elements, you’ll recognize this harmless fingerprint and you can easily remove it). Another web page might use a meta element to record the name of the web designers who created it, or the last time you updated the page. Some meta elements are more important than others, because search engines heed them. In the following sections, you’ll learn about two of these: the description and keywords meta elements.
These details, in conjunction with the <title> element, constitute the basic information that a search engine needs to gather about your page. UP TO SPEED
How Web Search Engines Work
A Web search engine like Google has three pieces. The first is an auto- mated program that roams the Web, downloading everything it finds. This program (often known by more picturesque names like spider, robot, or crawler) eventually stumbles across your website and copies its contents.
The second piece is an indexer that chews through Web pages and extracts a bunch of meaningful information, including a Web page’s title, description, and keywords. The indexer also records a great deal of more esoteric data. For example, a search engine like Google keeps track of the words that crop up the most often on a page, what other sites link to your page, and so on. The indexer inserts all this digested information into a giant catalog (technically called a database). The final piece of the search engine is the part you’re probably most familiar with—the front-end, or search page. You enter the keywords you’re hunting for, and the search engine scans its catalog looking for suitable pages. Different engines have different ways of ranking pages, but the basic idea is that the search engine attempts to make sure the most relevant and popular pages turn up early in the search results. A search engine like Google doesn’t rank websites individually. That is, there’s no such thing as the world’s most popular Web page (in the eyes of Google). instead, Google ranks pages in terms of how they stack up against whatever search keywords a visitor enters. That means that a slightly different search (say, “green tea health” instead of just “green tea”) could get you a completely different set of results.
The Description Meta Element
The description of your page is probably the easiest meta element to come up with. You simply write a few sentences that distill the content of your site into a few plain phrases. Here’s an example:
<meta name="description" content="Sugar Beat Music for Children offers age- appropriate music classes for children 4 months to 5 years old." />
Although you can stuff a lot of information into your description, it’s a good idea to limit it to a couple of focused sentences that to- tal no more than around 50 words. Some search engines home in on the description text, while others rely more heavily on the text in the page. Even if your description appears on a search results page, readers see only the first part of it, followed by an ellipsis (…) where it gets cut off.
Tip: The description meta element gives search engines some
key information. You should include it in every page you create.
The Keyword Meta Element
Your keyword meta element should contain a list of about 25 words or phrases that represent your website. Separate each word in the list by a comma. Here’s an example:
<meta name="keywords" content="sugarbeat, sugar, beat, music, children, musical, classes, movement, babies, infants, kids, child, creative" />
The keyword list is a great place to add important terms (like “horseback riding”), alternate spellings (“horse back riding”), syn- onyms or related words (“equestrian”), and even common misspell- ings (“ecquestrian”). Keywords aren’t case-sensitive. Unfortunately, there’s a huge caveat here. Most search engines don’t use the keyword list any longer. That’s because it was notori- ous for abuses (many a webmaster stuffed his keyword list full of hundreds of words, some only tangentially related to what was actually on the site). Search engines like Google take a more direct approach—they look at all the words in your web page, and pay special attention to words that appear more often, appear in head- ings, and so on. Most web experts argue that the keyword list has outlived its usefulness, and many don’t bother adding it to their pages at all. DESIGN TIME
The Importance of Titles and Image Text
A search engine draws information from many parts of your page, not just the meta elements. To make sure your pages are search-engine- ready, you should check to make sure you use the <title> element in all your pages, and that you use alternate text with all your images.
Alternate image text is the text a browser displays if it can’t retrieve an image. You specify this text using the alt attribute in the <img> ele- ment. search engines pay attention to the alternate text—for example, Google, uses it as the basis for its image-searching tool ( http://images. google.com/ ). if you don’t have alt text, Google has to guess what the picture is about by looking at nearby text, which is less reliable.
The <title> element also plays several important roles. You already know that it determines the text your browser displays in the title bar of the browser window. it also helps identify your Web page in a listing of search results (see Figure 1-3 , shown earlier). Finally, the <title> ele- ment contains the text that appears in the bookmarks menu if a visitor bookmarks your page. Keep that in mind, and refrain from adding long slogans. “Ketchup crusaders—Because ketchup isn’t just for making food tasty” is about the longest you can stretch a title, and even that’s iffy. on the other hand, remember not to omit essential information. The title “Welcome” or “Untitled 1” (a favorite in the Expression Web design program) isn’t very helpful.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION Keyword Tricks
Can I make my website more popular by adding hidden keywords?
There are quite a few unwholesome tricks that crafty Web weavers use to game the search engine system (or at least try). For example, they might add a huge number of keywords, but hide the text so it isn’t visible on the page (white text on a white background is one oddball option, but there are other style-sheet tricks). Another technique is to create pages that aren’t really a part of your website, but that you store on your server. You can fill these pages with repeating keyword text. To implement this trick, you use a little Javascript code to make sure real people who accidentally arrive at the page are directed to the entry point of your website, while search engines get to feast on the keywords.As seductive as some of these tricks may seem to lonely websites (and their owners), the best advice is to avoid them altogether. The first problem is that they pose a new set of headaches and technical challenges, which can waste hours of your day. But more significantly, search engines learn about these tricks almost as fast as Web develop- ers invent them. if a search engine catches you using these tricks, it may ban your site completely, relegating it to the dustbin of the Web. if you’re still tempted, keep this in mind: Many of these tricks just don’t work. in the early days of the Web, primitive search engines gave a site more weight based on the number of times a keyword cropped up, but modern search engines like Google use much more sophisticated page-ranking systems. A huge load of keywords probably won’t move you up the search list one iota.
Directories and Search Engines
Now that you’re well on your way to perfecting and popularizing your site, it’s time to start looking at the second level of Internet promotion—search engines. Getting your website into the most important search engine catalogs is a key step in publicizing it. Working your way up the rankings so web searchers are likely to find you takes more work, and monopolizes the late-night hours of many a webmaster.
Directories
Directories are searchable site listings with a difference: humans, not programs, create them. That means that a small army of work- ers painstakingly puts together a collection of sites, neatly sorted into categories. The advantage of directories is that they’re well- organized. A couple of clicks can get you a complete list of Califor- nia regional newspapers, for example. The unquestioned disad- vantage is that directories are dramatically smaller than full-text search catalogs. That means directories aren’t very useful for those in search of a piece of elusive information that doesn’t easily fall into a category, like a list of the English language’s most commonly misspelled words. Over the years, as the Web’s ballooned in size, di- rectories have become increasingly specialized, and full-text search tools like Google and Yahoo have become the most common way that people hunt for information.
So, given that directories are just the unattractive cousins of full-text search engines, why do you need to worry about them? Two reasons. First, some web visitors still use directories, even if they don’t use them as often as they do full-text search engines. Second, some search engines (including Google) pay attention to directory listings, and tend to rank sites higher if they turn up in certain directories. Getting into the right directories can help you start to move up the results list in a full-text search. And just like college, getting into a directory requires that you submit an ap- plication, which you’ll learn about next.
The Open Directory Project
The most important directory to submit your site to is the Open
http://dmoz.org/
Directory Project (ODP) at . The ODP is a huge, long-standing website directory staffed entirely by thousands of volunteer editors who review submissions in countless categories. The ODP isn’t the most popular web directory (that honor cur- rently goes to the Yahoo directory), but other search engines use it behind the scenes. In fact, Google bases its own directory service
http://directory.google.com/ ( ) on the ODP.
Before submitting to the ODP, take the time to make sure you do it right. An incorrect submission could result in your website not get- ting listed at all. You can find a complete description of the rules at
http://dmoz.org/add.html/
, but here are the key requirements: • Don’t submit your site more than once.
- Don’t submit your site to more than one category.
- Don’t submit more than one page or section of your site (un- less you have a really good reason, like the separate sections are notably different).
- Don’t submit sites that contain “illegal” content. By the OPD’s definition, this is more accurately described as unsavory content, like pornography, libelous content, or material that advocates illegal activity—you know who you are.
- Clean up any broken links, outdated information, or any other red flags that might suggest to an editor that your site isn’t here for the long term.
- When you submit your site, describe it carefully and accurately.
Don’t promote it. In other words “Ketchup Masters is a manu- facturer of gourmet ketchup” is acceptable. “Ketchup Masters is the best food-oriented site on the Web—the Louisville Times says you can’t miss it!” isn’t.
- Don’t submit an incomplete site. Your “under construction” page won’t get listed.
The next step is to spend some time at the
http://dmoz.org/
site, until you find the single best category for your site (see Figure 1-4 ). Once you do, click the “suggest URL” link at the top of the page and fill out the submission form (see Figure 1-5 ). The form asks for your URL, the title of your site, a brief description, and your email address.
Note: if you have some free time on your hands, you can offer to help edit a site category—just click the “Become an editor” link.
And even if you don’t have editorial aspirations, why not check out the editor guidelines at http://dmoz.org/guidelines/ to get a better idea of what’s going on in the mind of oDP editors, and how they evaluate your site submission?
Figure 1-4: Top: When you first get to the ODP site, you see a group of general, top-level categories.
Bottom: As you click your way deeper into the topic hierarchies, you’ll even- tually find a specific subcategory that would make a good home for your site. Here’s the Arts:Visual Arts:Native and Tribal category. There are several subcategories (like Asia, with 22 sites). Categories with an @ after their names link to a related categories in a different place in the topic hierarchy.
Figure 1-5: Here’s a portion of the ODP submission form for a new site.
Read all the instructions carefully, fill in the boxes, and then click the inviting Submit button at the bottom of the page (not shown here).
Once you submit your site, there’s nothing to do but wait (and submit your site to the other directories and search engines dis- cussed in this chapter). If two or three weeks pass without your site appearing in the listing and you haven’t received an email describ- ing any problems with it, try submitting your site again. If that still doesn’t work, it’s time to contact the category editor. Write a polite email asking why your site wasn’t added to the listings, and include the date of your submission(s) and the name, URL, and description of your site. You can find the email address for the category editor at the very bottom of the category page (see Figure 1-6 ).
Figure 1-6: Click the editor’s name (“sprice”) to find out who he is, what categories he manages, and how you can email him.
The Yahoo directory
ODP is a great starting point, but it isn’t the only directory on the http://dir. block. The other heavyweight is the Yahoo directory (
yahoo.com/
). Unfortunately, getting your site into the Yahoo direc- tory takes considerably more work. First, there’s the issue of cost. If you’ve created a non-commercial site, you can probably get in free, but it may take persistence, emails, multiple submissions, and a bit of luck. If you’ve created a commercial site (one whose primary purpose is to make money) and you want to register it in the U.S. Yahoo directory, you need to pay an annual fee of several hundred dollars. And in the ultimate case of adding insult to injury, you won’t get your money back if Yahoo rejects your site.
To get started, you can review Yahoo’s official submission guide-
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/directory/suggest/
lines at
listings-03.html/
. However, you’ll be much happier with the unof- ficial write-up at http://www.apromotionguide.com/yahoo.html/ , which discusses your free and for-fee options, and explains what the cryptic rejection emails Yahoo sends out really mean. And if you have a commercial website, or you just don’t want to suffer through the slow and unreliable free registration process, you’ll need to use the Yahoo Directory Submit service (formerly called
https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/
Yahoo Express), which is described at
submit/intro/ .
Once you’re done with directories (or just ready to move on), it’s time to take a look at full-text search engines.
Search Engines
For most people, search engines are the one and only tool for find- ing information on the Web. If you want the average person to find your site, you need to make sure it’s in the most popular search engine catalogs, and turns up as one of the results in relevant searches. This task is harder than it seems, because the Web is full of millions of sites jockeying for position. To get noticed, you need to spend time developing your site and enhancing its visibility. You also need to understand how search engines rank pages (see the box below for an example). http://www.
The undisputed king of Web search engines is Google (
google.com/
). Not only is it far and away the Web’s most popu- lar search engine, it also powers other search engines (usually without being credited). Google performs an amazing amount of work—every day it chews through hundreds of millions of search requests.
For more information about search engines, including who’s Tip: on top and who owns who, check out http://www.searchen- . gineland.com/
It’s not too difficult to get Google to notice your site. By the time your site’s about a month old, Google will probably have stumbled across it at least once, usually by following a link from another site or from the ODP. As described in the box above, Google takes outside links into consideration when sizing up a site, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely you are to turn up in some- one’s search results. If you’re impatient or you think Google’s passing you by, you can
http://
introduce yourself directly using the submission form at
www.google.com/addurl/
(see Figure 1-7 ). Most popular search en- gines include a submission form like this. Just make sure you keep track of where you’ve submitted, so you don’t inadvertently submit your site to the same search engine more than once.
Rising up in the rankings You’ll soon discover that it’s not difficult to get into Google’s index.
But you might find it exceedingly hard to get noticed. For example, suppose you’ve submitted the site http://www.SamMenzesHome- madePasta.com/. To see if you’re in Google, try an extremely specific search that targets just your site, like “Sam Menzes Home- made Pasta.” This should definitely lead to your doorstep. Now, try searching for just “Homemade Pasta.” Odds are, you won’t turn up in the top 10, or even the top 100.
Figure 1-7: You can safely skip the comments section on this page but make sure to include the http:// prefix at the start of your Web page’s URL.
So how do you create a site that the casual searcher’s likely to find? There’s no easy answer. Just remember that the secret to getting a good search ranking is having a good PageRank, and getting a good PageRank is all about connections. To stand out, your web- site needs to share links with other leading sites in your category.
If you want to delve into the nitty-gritty of search engine optimiza- tion (known to webmasters as SEO), consider becoming a regular
http://www.webmasterworld.com/ http://www.search-
reader of and
engineland.com/
. You’ll find articles and forums where webmasters discuss the good, bad, and downright seedy tricks you can try to get noticed.
Tip: it’s possible to get too obsessed with search engine rank-
ings. Here’s a good rule of thumb—don’t spend more time trying to improve your search engine ranking than you do improving your website. in the long term, the only way to gain real popu- larity is to become one of the best sites on the block. UP TO SPEEDHow Google’s PageRank Works
Google uses a rating system called PageRank to size up different Web pages. Google doesn’t use Pagerank to find search results; instead, it uses it to order them. When you execute a search with Google, it pulls out all the sites that match your search keywords. Then it orders the results according to the Pagerank of each page. The basic idea behind the Pagerank system is that the value of your website is determined by the community of other websites that link to it. There are a few golden rules: • The more sites that link to you, the better.
- A link from a more popular site (a site with a high Pagerank) is more valuable than a link from a less popular site.
- The more links a site has, the less each link is worth. in other words, if someone links to your site and just a handful of other sites, that link is valuable. if someone links to your site and hun- dreds of other sites, the link’s value is diluted.
Although Google regularly fine-tunes its secret Pagerank recipe, Web experts spend hours trying to deconstruct it. For some fascinating read- ing, you can learn more about how Pagerank works (loosely) at http:// www.akamarketing.com/google-ranking-tips.html/ and http://www. markhorrell.com/seo/pagerank.html/ . Google co-founders sergey Brin and Larry Page describe the original formulation of Pagerank in an academic paper by at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google. html/ .
For way more information about Google and its internal workings, check out Google: The Missing Manual.
The Google Webmaster Tools
If you’re feeling a bit in the dark about how your website rates with Google, you’ll be happy to know that Google has a service that can help you out. It’s called the Google Webmaster Tools, and you can sign up your site for free at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/ tools/
.